Buying Decisions

Compared to the next person I'm a pretty terrible consumer in that I'm non-materialistic and somewhat of a minimalist, which makes analyzing my buying decisions a bit tricky. Needless to say I don't do much impulse buying but I guess one situation where I seem to suspend all price-consciousness and control of impulse is whenever I'm in a convenience store prior to or during a road trip. I just grab everything that looks tasty irrespective of the over-priced prices.

Maybe it's the idea that I'm going to be stuck on the road for a long time and I want to have the option to snack on things if I get a bit hungry so that I don't have to stop mid-trip at a restaurant. Or maybe the road trip is simply an excuse to indulge more than usual, I'm not sure.

One semi-impulse buy was when my friend informed me that NewEgg had $300 Polk Audio speakers on sale for $110 for a limited time. I have always enjoyed music and had pieced together a pretty good sound system but my large speakers which had been acquired from a friend who was getting rid of them because they were too old and beat-up (and which I preceded to use for another 6 years lol) were likely on their last leg.

So after a little research to determine that Polk Audio was a high quality brand, and figuring in the huge price discount I chose to purchase two of them despite the fact that my other speakers were still working OK at the moment. The huge price discount was the driving factor for sure though. Had they only been half-off I probably wouldn't have made the purchase.

As for making well-thought out purchases, this comes into play whenever I am looking to purchase a new laptop. Realizing that my past laptop experience was absolutely terrible because Dell's are pieces of crap that break really easily and have their batteries die very fast, I decided that I wanted the most durable laptop possible so that it would last a long time without the screen breaking from a two-foot fall off a couch (stupid Dell) and one that was high enough quality that I could rely of the battery not dying, turning the laptop into a portable desktop within 6 months (stupid Dell).

I researched and read through all the top laptop review sites and determined that Lenovo ThinkPad's were arguably the toughest laptop on the market. This solidified my decision to buy a Lenovo making it only a matter of searching their products to find the best laptop suited to my needs.

I have been very happy to find that after a few death-defying falls that would have obliterated most comparable Dell's, my laptop still works great.